This blog.

A friend of mine said to me before that "when you get older, you become what you hate". From reading this blog, you might think that here at Derelict Dublin, from our continual harping on about the causes and effects of dereliction in the city, that we hated the process and visible results of it. Far from it! It gives us something to bitch about and makes us open our eyes when we're wandering around the city. But, as you may have noticed in recent months, the level of postings has decreased dramatically. The blog itself has become neglected, unkempt, a bit of an eyesore. Much like many of the buildings described within.

So what's caused this then? Call it a general malaise. We're growing tired of this city, and recently having visited two other urban centres where the energy and noise (and sunshine) far exceeded anything that this miserable little place could generate. Its time to vacate the premises and move on somewhere else. There are many other derelicts we've come across which have been photographed and sniffed around, but never felt the need to document here. We'll see what happens with our new residence; whether it lives up to expectations. We might be back here sooner than we think. But hopefully not. Dublin is boring now. Even the recession is boring. We cant listen or read another article about how its somehow the 80's all over again. Give us a break. And when the recession is over (its all boom/bust/boom/bust, thats how capitalist economies go) its not as if somehow all the idiots in the city will have changed. They'll all be back in Dundrum en masse as if it never happened. For many it wont have anyway.

So thats all folks. We'll leave this blog here, vacant and decaying, as a little momento/historical archive for googlers to stumble across, but dont expect any updates any time soon. Over and out.

The Thomas House, 86 Thomas Street, Dublin 8

One word: Ha! Never was there a more cautionary tale of Celtic Tiger excess than this place here. I passed by it recently and admittedly danced a little jig of schadenfreudic glee at its demise. What do you do if you have a cool, authentic, small, old, run down little pub, right next to an art college, with relaxed staff, music on every night of the week, with queues out the door at the weekend, with people like Andy Weatherall playing surprise DJ sets there, with people up dancing on the tables and chairs in a raucous atmosphere, having a great time, and pouring money into the tills of the pub? Why, you shut it down for a couple of years of course! Thereby alienating any of the regular clientele you had who felt they had a bit of ownership over the place by organising the music nights there, and then renovate it into a soulless, steel and black leather, generic boozer that you could find in any other part of the city, with zero character and zero atmosphere, build some equally generic apartments over it, and what do you get? A derelict pub! Here's a word of advice for any would be investors out there who think that gutting a pub and making it nice and new and fancy will suddenly bring in a load more business (another example at the moment is Walsh's in Stoneybatter) - LEAVE IT THE FUCK ALONE. Some of your customers might actually like the old tattered seats, the carpets, the welcoming smell of generations of spilled beer. The Thomas House tried to recapture its cool with DJs and the like, performing in the non-space of upstairs, and occasionally getting a crowd in downstairs in the miserable basement, but to be honest I'm glad its closed, may it stand as a shining example of the idiocy of killing the goose that lays the golden egg in early 2000's Dublin.

UPDATE: 134 Navan Road, Dublin 7 ("Cabra Farm")

Now you see it, now you dont. "Cabra Farm" got the chop recently, thanks again to P for the heads up. Apartments, apartments, apartments... They could have left some of the trees, couldnt they...?

Sutton Cross, Sutton, Dublin 13

Every so often something happens that provokes a near-LSD like mental self-examination of what you're doing with yourself overall in life... or maybe just that day. I'd been out snapping pix of a couple of gafs in the two-digit postcode northern surbubs, tut-tutting about the general dereliction. The improving weather will hopefully mean improving regularity of posting here by the way (dont bet your house on it though). So there I was anyway minding my own business (if you call photographing other people's property minding one's own business), when next thing a part of one of my teeth fell out onto my tongue. Straight out of the blue. No warning whatsoever. I found myself looking in the wing mirror of a parked car to see the damage. And then it hit me - maybe this was some sort of evil karma coming back on me, that for the exposure of the derelict gafs around the city - ye gods were to spite me and turn my body to a crumbling, disintegrating mess. Just like the houses I'd been snooping around in. For a couple of days after this weekend this niggling paranoia persisted. Any ache or slight pain was ran through a roller coaster of potential catastrophic outcomes, from kidney failure to cancer to any type of STI I'd ever heard of. I was getting turned into a derelict house myself.

Bizarrely enough as well in the last two weeks, Superquinn continually appeared in some shape or form in my life. I rewatched Des Bishop's RTE series on DVD of him working in shit low paid jobs in Ireland - one of which was in Superquinn in Dundalk. An abandoned scorch-marked trolley from Superquinn keeps popping up in the laneway behind my house and in different places around the estate - even though there isnt a Superquinn for miles where I live. My current dark-skinned latina lover has the misfortune to work at the "Protein Counter" (i.e. meat+fish) in said supermarket. And to top it all off, on the day of the broken tooth, we came across this gem right at the junction of Sutton Cross - right next to the back entrance to, of course, Superquinn. What do you suppose it all means? Is Feargal Quinn employing some sort of cosmic energy to align these events as to make me change my usual Lidl, Tesco, and Dunnes habits? Are the pallets stacked in the back garden of this house belonging to the supermarket - or just happen to be there by random chance? And does anyone know a good cheap dentist?

Ballymun Road (St. Pappins Road junction), Glasnevin, Dublin 9

I guess its symptomatic of the blandness of todays students that a big derelict house can sit next to a university (DCU) with no sign of students either trying to squat it for housing - or even just break into it for a free place to have some sort of a wild booze and coke fuelled party with proper sexual experiences progressing beyond heavy digital petting during freshers week. I guess they dont need to crack out a crowbar seeing as how they all seem to be flush with cash. There isnt even any graffitti on the house! I just dont believe the stories that USI come out with these days when they say university students have it hard. All of them seem to be swanning around town in astronomically priced gear from the likes of Urban Outfitters that make me cry into my can of Dutch Gold when my pay cheque arrives. When I was a student (oh great, here we go, I hear you say) all anyone did was speed - the poor man's coke. Now everyone seems to do the rich man's coke - coke. This house is right next to the bus stop on the Ballymun Road entrance to DCU, the long avenue that hugs the north side of Hampstead Park. The house may be called Albert College House, but I cant be sure. No number on it. The estate to the rear of this house (a gate at the rear of the house opens into the housing estate) is called Albert College. Looks nice and spacious, as much as I can ascertain with the windows and doors completely boarded up and blocking my view that is... with an ample garden still in good condition not needing much hacking, slashing, and burning. Only one or two beer cans dumped in the hedges - and no used condoms! Hmm. Maybe students are actually studying these days.

8 and 9 Luttrellstown Glade, Diswellstown, Carpenterstown, Dublin 15

Mirror images of each other in the distant, distant suburbs. Took a bit of time to find these two (thanks to B for the info). Buried in the depths of suburban commuter-ville, this is the type of place that features in the news because: the kids dont have a place in the local school, the buses and/or trains are crammed to the gills for one hour in the morning and one hour in the evening with local reps crying out for more (yet empty the rest of the time), or featuring in some wanky lifestyle piece by McWilliams about decklanders, dinkys, or whatever compartmentalisations he's dreamt up this week. These two spacious three (probably) beds are in a nicer part of the city, tagging itself with the Castleknock moniker even though its nowhere near it. Probably worth about three quarters, so why empty? Cant understand it. There was a little field next to them with a couple of cars up on bricks, maybe this may have scared off any timid owners - regrettably the memory card on the camera was full so I didnt get a pic of these, and there's no way I'm going all the way out there again. So still a bit of a mystery, especially since both of them at the end of the road are empty. Looks like from the lock on the back door of one of them that somebody was trying to make their way in with a crowbar, but didnt get very far. There's nothing in either house anyway. The area is very boring. Its probably influenced this boring post.

35 Mountpleasant Square, Ranelagh, Dublin 6

Get your head around this one. One of the most expensive parts of the city (the fiefdom of the ex Minister for Justice, and the scene of many a gushing Celtic-Tiger gushing lifestyle piece, harping on about the wonderful selection of restaurants and cafes on the main street), and one of the most desirable addresses in that area - with a blistering eyesore of a derelict gaf sitting on its corner. I remember my mam telling me that when she moved to Dublin first in the 70's, this square had something of a shit name. I imagine it was probably all subdivided into flats for poor miserable bearded students, all paying overpriced rent into the hands of the same fat Garda who reputedly owned half of Dublin 6 up until the mid 90's (ok, possible urban legend). We really need to get our hands on a Thom's Directory here to name and shame the owners. This could be a nice large family home, and surely its worth a million euro or so, yet here it is sitting idly by, boarded up and turning slowly to shit. CPO! CPO!
(Thanks to S for the heads up on this one. Apologies for the delay but we rarely venture south of the river - the people over there speak with forked tongue, and it makes us feel poor)

7 Myrtle Street, Broadstone, Dublin 7

I wonder if derelict houses have a gender. I imagine with some degree of certainty that the owners are inevitably male. This impression doesnt come from looking at the derelict sites registers and seeing the names are those of men; its more from a general sensation that without the loving, caressing, gentle female touch that the owners eventually stop giving a fuck about the things that they have, and find themselves (or their houses) falling down into this spiral of regret, decay, self-destruction, with scant regard for the concerns of others. Or maybe its not that the owners or houses are male, maybe its just that they're of either gender, but lonely and isolated in the city where they find themselves, in need someone to come and take them in their hands, reassure them that everything will be OK, that any surface damage or serious structural physical defects inflicted during a rough period of dereliction can be repaired, regenerated... that there is some love there still which can inject life and succour back to where there was once none... This small cottage is located in the little warren of streets near the Blessington Street Basin. Myrtle Street is the continuation of Wellington Street, off Dorset St.